Linas PAULAUSKIS | To Be Tuba
According to some music reviewers, Lithuania is really turning into the land of tubas. We can see a rising number of both composers who write new music for the instrument and tuba players eager to perform it. Recently, there’s also been an increasing number of those who themselves compose and/or improvise. This is what this text is about – the Lithuanian players and composers who are working with this remarkable instrument.
But firstly – from the music instrument’s jokes:
What is the difference between an amateur and a professional tuba player?
The amateur plays:
C \ G / C \ G / C \ G / C \ G ...
And the professional goes:
C \ G / C \ G / C \ G / C\G/A/B ...
And this is where the jokes end – because blowing the tuba is no joke, or is it?
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According to the reviewer Laimonas Masevičius (himself a tuba player who performs at the Lithuanian National Opera and Ballet Theatre and lectures at the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre), “With its large number of solo tuba players, Lithuania is clearly the proud leader in the Baltic region.” Here I do not aim to list all the tuba players in the country but would rather prefer to focus specifically on the notable Lithuanian performers of contemporary music, as well as the improvisers and musicians who inspire composers to write for tuba. I will also touch on some of the moments in the creative careers of the composers who write for tuba.
The first of such works was Concertino for tuba and symphony orchestra, by Benjaminas Gorbulskis, who we could consider perhaps the second most productive Lithuanian composer. He not only wrote popular songs and symphonic jazz pieces but was also the first in the country to use a dodecaphonic technique. Written during the last year of his life (1986), Concertino was dedicated to Leonardas Ulevičius, the pioneer of Lithuania’s tuba school – all local tuba players have been taught either by Ulevičius or his students. The style of this composition could also be described as symphonic jazz with some side-tracking into the territory of abstract expressionism.
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Another period of collaborations between tuba players and composers came a decade later thanks to the initiatives of the tubist Segijus Kirsenka. In 1995, the composer Vytautas Germanavičius wrote “Eos” – the first solo piece for tuba in Lithuanian music history – specifically for Kirsenka. This was followed by “Attention! High Tension!” (2001), a piece for tuba and piano and “Ab initio” (2004) for tuba and recording, both by Žibuoklė Martinaitytė; “Bussana” (2003) for tuba and piano by Valdas Stanaitis; “TubAccordo Duo” (2007) for tuba and accordion and “Mosaic V” (2021) for solo tuba by Vaida Striaupaitė-Beinarienė; and Quintet for tuba and strings (2019) by Linas Baltas. All these pieces were recorded for Sergijus Kirsenka’s solo album Ab initio (2021), and they are also included in the collection of digital scores published by the Music Information Centre Lithuania. With Kirsenka in mind, the composer Linas Baltas also wrote “RASA” (2016), a concerto for tuba and symphony orchestra – the second such work in the history of Lithuanian music.
The composer Žibuoklė Martinaitytė has a special relationship with the instrument. With its distinctive low-frequency range, the tuba seemed to be particularly suited for her work which, back in the early 2000s, was characteristically extravert, energetic, or some would say, even aggressive – the very title “Attention! High Tension!” seems to speak for itself. In “Ab initio”, her second piece for tuba, we can already hear the anticipation of new creative developments in her work. Without losing focused energy, her music was now moving towards peace and depth, contemplating the various interactions between the different planes of reality (for instance, when the tuba lines are accompanied by the field recording of a bird’s song).
Today we will rarely see Sergijus Kirsenka performing as a soloist. He still spends a lot of time with his ‘bass brass’ ensemble Sonum Brass Trio (Tomas Karka – alto trombone, Valentas Marozas – tenor trombone, Sergijus Kirsenka – tuba), encouraging Lithuanian composers to make music for these instruments. Their 2019 album Louder-Quieter lists the same-titled piece by Žibuoklė Martinaitytė (this composer is always a must), as well as pieces by Linas Baltas, Vaida Striaupaitė-Beinarienė, Andrius Šiurys, Artūras Mikoliūnas and Jonas Jurkūnas.
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The tuba player Simonas Kaupinis is a stylistically wide-ranged artist, well known in the circles of contemporary academic, improvisational and jazz music. He is a member of multiple ensembles, including Synaesthesis, Kanalizacija, Broken Glass 4tet, Ąžuoliniai berželiai, Laivo Troupe, Marijus Aleksa’s jazz orchestra (featured in this issue), Improdimension Orchestra, and Rakija Klezmer Orkestar (in the last two ensembles he plays together with another tuba player, Mikas Kurtinaitis). Being an expert in circular breathing, Kaupinis experiments with timbres, registers and techniques. He likes to experiment by covering the bell of the tuba with various resonant objects, or attaching a bassoon reed to the mouthpiece in order to produce some ‘excellent noise’. In 2021, he released the solo album Tubism, featuring eight of his original compositions/ improvisations. Kaupinis had been developing an idea for this album since his early attempts at improvising while studying for an MA in Contemporary and Improvised Music at the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre. Back then he wanted to do a solo concert of improvised music, so it seemed only natural to release an album too. He was aiming to employ various extended techniques, which he thought was the most interesting thing at the time. His improvisations have led him to keep adding multiple layers and use overdubbing techniques, which unexpectedly resulted in music that was rather different from what was initially intended.
Since the release of this album, Kaupinis has composed music not for his own solo project but for other bands he plays in, which is why he is on the lookout for a wide range of ideas, depending on the particular project. When performing the music of other composers, he is happy to fulfil their requirements, especially when the concept seems convincing and interesting enough, even if it appears to be complicated. He considers it a good challenge he might otherwise avoid in his own improvisations. Meanwhile, in his improvisations he has no one to turn to but himself, and this self-exposure constitutes an interesting challenge of an entirely different kind.
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Differently from Simonas Kaupinis, the tuba player Mikas Kurtinaitis has no formal education in jazz or improvisation. However, during the 2022 Vilnius Jazz Festival “Young Power” competition, his duo with the flautist Salomėja Kalvelytė won a special prize for the best interpretation of a jazz standard (a fascinating combination of timbres, reminiscent of the tuba and birdsong duo by Žibuoklė Martinaitytė.) The following year, when playing solo in the same competition, Kurtinaitis won both the Grand Prix and the Best Instrumentalist award. As if a single tuba weren’t enough, he started using multiple tubas at the same time: he distributes them around the corners of the stage, hangs them on the balconies, and interconnects them with a set of pipes. By manipulating the inner construction of his tuba from the centre of the stage, he directs the air stream to the target instruments around him. Such performances require a lot of endurance and concentration: blowing even a single tuba is no joke, and Kurtinaitis sets out to play four of them simultaneously, nonetheless managing to artfully control all the sonic nuances and spatial counterpoints.
Mikas Kurtinaitis is a multi-instrumentalist, not only in the sense of being a ‘multi-tubist’: in the aforementioned Rakija Klezmer Orkestar, instead of playing a tuba, sousaphone, helicon or euphonium, he does the drumming and singing. When introducing the winner of the 2023 Vilnius Jazz Young Power, the festival’s concert presenter Domantas Razauskas – also a music reviewer, songwriter and chair of the Lithuanian Neighbouring Rights Association (AGATA) – concluded that “Lithuania is turning into the land of tubas”.
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Quick tangent number one. Raised in Vilnius in 1980, the TV Tower (326.5 m) remains the tallest building in Lithuania. After the developments of digital and cable television, it has lost its initial significance yet remains an important historical monument that has its place in the history of technology and Lithuanian history. In 1991, 12 unarmed civilian defenders of the TV Tower were killed and hundreds were injured as the soviet army tried to seize it in an attempt to take control of the national TV broadcast service and spread anti-Lithuanian propaganda.
In 2022, the TV Tower was briefly turned into one of the site-specific venues of the festival “Music in Space”. For this occasion, the composer Kristupas Bubnelis wrote “Turm-Musik”, a piece for four tubas, this time performed not by a single musician but four: Sergijus Kirsenka, Patrikas Kišūnas, Laimonas Masevičius and Mikas Kurtinaitis. Usually closed to the wider public, the staircase spaces were turned into a huge resonant instrument, quite similarly to how concert halls and church spaces become extensions of the pipe organ. The rich interplay of meanings and visuals involved references to the medieval genre of ‘tower music’, or ‘tubas inside a tube’, as well as the similarities in the shapes of both the tuba and the TV Tower – the bell and the shaft.
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Speaking of more popular music: since 1984, Antis has been known as arguably the most famous Lithuanian post-punk and comedy rock band. In 1985-1988, before it turned to political rock, the band had its musical and visual image greatly impacted by the tubist Vytautas Kubilius. Similarly, today, the Latin American and Balkan-flavoured music collectives Mood Sellers, Trimbao, The Honkin’ Dudes, and Los Secretos de Pablo are benefiting from the creative input of tubist Lukas Pivoriūnas. He also likes to roam in more experimental territory where he plays sousaphone (with another sousaphonist Mikas Kurtinaitis, Simonas Kaupinis and bass saxophonist Dovydas Stalmokas) in Low Blow – a band that claims to blow in low frequencies the whole range of abstract, microtonal, rock, and written music.
Our arguably most ‘performative’ Lithuanian electronic music artist Arma Agharta – with his arsenal of toy and circuit-bent synthesisers, and many other kinds of unusual devices, modern and obsolete – is known to sometimes pick up a tuba too, greatly enriching his ‘shamanic’ performances both musically and visually. Meanwhile, Simonas Kaupinis has been expressing an interest in playing his tuba in contexts as paradoxical as those of metal, hip-hop, or electronic music.
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Tangent number two. Both the Lithuanian Composers’ Union and the Music Information Centre Lithuania are based in the modernist building located in the heart of Vilnius, which also happens to be an unexpectedly peaceful and idyllic place. Built in 1966, this architectural complex was inspired by the Finnish concept of ‘organic architecture’, and is now part of Lithuania’s cultural heritage. Back in the day, the complex had a cumbersome heating system that took up lots of space in the basement – it was used to service both the building and the entire adjacent housing block.
The heating equipment that once took up several rooms can now easily fit in a wardrobe-sized box. This has freed up a lot of space which was left unused for a while, but it did not take long to realise that such unusual post-industrial spaces (be it towers, basements, etc.) can be appreciated by culture and used as locations for new projects of art and music.
Now obsolete and covered in glittery tatters of insulation foil, heating tubes loom large below the ceiling, and playing tubas under the tubes in such a location indeed seems rather fitting. In 2023, in collaboration with the Music Information Centre Lithuania, the duo of Simonas Kaupinis on tuba and Arminas Bižys on baritone saxophone introduced a set of music by themselves and by the composers Arturas Bumšteinas and Dominykas Digimas. Their show “Taming the Air” was filmed and recorded in that basement space once filled with heating machinery (the video is available on the LMIC website www.mic.lt). In one of their attempts to ‘tame the air’, they made both of their instruments draw air simultaneously from a compressor that was custom-built by Simonas Nekrošius, the inventor of musical instruments and sound systems (doesn’t this seem somewhat similar to Mikas Kurtinaitis’ invention?). The show has already made its way to Onze Ambassade (The Hague) and the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival (hcmf//). By the way, since 2022, the Huddersfield festival has been presenting a wide range of new Lithuanian music for several years, and we can be sure to see the tuba standing out there like a Boss!